Swept up in the carnage were sites such as Reddit, FourSquare, Yelp, Qantas and LinkedIn.

Was your site hit by the leap second? Leave a comment below to let us know. We'd also love to hear what configuration of servers were or were not hit over the weekend.

About Chris Duckett

Some would say that it is a long way from software engineering to journalism, others would correctly argue that it is a mere 10 metres according to the floor plan.During his first five years with CBS Interactive, Chris started his journalistic advent...

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Some would say that it is a long way from software engineering to journalism, others would correctly argue that it is a mere 10 metres according to the floor plan.During his first five years with CBS Interactive, Chris started his journalistic adventure in 2006 as the Editor of Builder AU after originally joining the company as a programmer.Leaving CBS Interactive in 2010 to follow his deep desire to study the snowdrifts and culinary delights of Canada, Chris based himself in Vancouver and paid for his new snowboarding and poutine cravings as a programmer for a lifestyle gaming startup.Chris returns to CBS in 2011 as the Editor of TechRepublic Australia determined to meld together his programming and journalistic tendencies once and for all.In his free time, Chris is often seen yelling at different operating systems for their own unique failures, avoiding the dreaded tech support calls from relatives, and conducting extensive studies of internets -- he claims he once read an entire one.

All our Production Ubuntu servers, primarily Lucid and Precise, running NTP were hit. Anything java related would spin up all cores to 100% utilization. This was very frustrating and in the end rebooted to fix before learning of the simple date fix. I'm surprised this would even be an issue these days with the Linux kernel.

I have mix of new & old Linux systems here and they fared well over leap-second & all logged that it happened. I also have Mac OS X & Windows of various versions which fared well also, no issues I saw when I came in on Monday.
However, I read that on Linux mailing list that some Linux systems had issues that was caused by the ntp daemon was in a endless loop which the solution was either to manually enter the correct date or reboot.

There's a window every three months for adjusting UTC (calculated time, based on cesium clocks etc.) to be aligned with GMT (Measured time, based on observations on earths rotation.
Some times, an additional second is added to UTC, other times, a second is subtracted from UTC, so that UTC, ideally, should never differ from GMT by more than 1 second.
This practice has been going on for many-many years. So I don't think that just the leap second in itself is to blame here.

Win 7 Pro "shut down" my netbook to protect it from an "unexpected error".
It was streaming a US radio station in the at the time .
Oddly enough, it was shortly after midnight EDT, 0400 UTC, 2300 CDT at the stream source.
Aparently occuring when my local computer rolled over to the next day.
Other computers here (most Win 7), were all OK.

The leap second has been applied before AFAIK (note for Suresh). A few months ago on (UK) radio I heard a debate about whether it should be abolished and time be allowed to drift apart from the earth's movement or not. There are one or two cogent reasons for doing that.
However, my preference at the time was for keeping the leap second and I did not think it would have any consequences, but it does, it seems...
I found this interesting nugget about Google on the BBC website:
In a blog post written last year, Google explained how it planned to avoid the leap second issue by using a tactic it called a "leap smear".
This involved incrementally adding tiny fractions of time - a couple of milliseconds - gradually over the course of a day.
"This meant that when it became time to add an extra second at midnight, our clocks had already taken this into account, by skewing the time over the course of the day," explained Christopher Pascoe, the company's site reliability engineer.
This is as good a summary of the situation and arguments either way as any:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16625614

and the only differences between them that i can see, off hand, is the Windows system was the only one that was in constant time checking mode as I usually don't do that, while my son does and his Windows system locked up on him for no discernible reason, and that is the only thing we can think of that may have caused it.

I have a server that keeps time for the network. Every time a user logs in, the computer time is synced with the primary server. That server updates it's clock once a week. Never had a time related issue. Even the antivirus software doesn't care unless it's more than an hour off.
Granted, I don't have any extremely time sensitive functions that require absolutely perfect synchronization, but a web server crashing because the time changed 1 second?! How do they survive Daylight Savings Time, and why doesn't the computer world end on a leap year? :)

I've seen some systems set to allow a few minutes variation work, and others crash when there is NO TOLERANCE at all set in the system. I try to avoid such set ups as much as possible in order to reduce the workload of dealing with such issues.

that when you provide your own domain and server it is not as much of a problem; especially inside your LAN. But if communicating across long distances happens; it can be a problem for devices that rely on hand shakes with different devices, and even the speed of light/electricity can have an affect on this process. Timing is critical, obviously or the atomic clock would not be a standard for the web. In this instance, the movement of the earth becomes more critical than exact timing; therefore the constant need to adjust to reality instead of science in a perfect vacuum.